


phantom/culture

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013), The Social Network (2010)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Jaeger Pilots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-04 03:09:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1075823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mark Zuckerberg is not in California when the Trespasser makes landfall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	phantom/culture

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosepetalfall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosepetalfall/gifts).



> rosepetalfall asked for a TSN jaeger pilots AU, anything with Mark, Marilyn, and Dustin, who are her favorites. She gave me a couple Rumi poems to work with ♥ Girl knows the way to my heart, I'm not even kidding.
> 
> **Warnings** for angst, character death on level with the Pacific Rim canon, minor displays of ableism, minor gore, minor violence.
> 
> Can be read here or [@ LJ.](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/122390.html)

-

 

_the minute i heard my first love story_  
i started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was  
\- rumi

 

**november, 2003.**

The bar is crowded. A boy sits at a postage-stamp table made for two, alone.

A girl, at the door, stops walking. She is small, and her clothes hang off her in layers of patterns. A laddered tear marches up the backs of her tights, showing the skin beneath, and her hat flops against the back of her head like it'd been blown there by a strong wind.

She turns around and comes back. She has to angle her body like a minnow to slip between the crush of people, everybody wearing the same browns and reds of autumn, standing around to have the same kinds of conversations people have been standing in these exact spots to have since before this country was even an independent country.

He sees her coming.

The fleshy expression on his face -- strangely wounded and raw -- crystalizes instantly.

_It's going to bother me if I don't explain some things to you,_ is what's thrown at the tabletop, there between the two glasses, and his fingers twitch back from the splattered, gory remains her sentence makes when it lands. She sits down. The postage-stamp table jumps, and her eyes are frightening, but he's already leaning in. _Do not interrupt me._

The boy sets his jaw like a steel trap. He does not interrupt.

 

**august, 2013.**

A woman walks down a street she thinks might be hers, though the only way she knows is because of the sign leveled across the road, marking the street with a cross like a gravemarker. She stands over it and looks, _Pinecone Expway_ pointing north and _Cedar St_ lying crooked over the stop sign she's pretty sure she's rolled past since the day she got her license.

In rubble, all the houses look the same.

She looks from one pile of timber and plaster and the chalky remains of painted brick to another, trying to identify which one housed her long-boned adolescent wail of a self.

Her name is Amelia Ritter.

She was four months away from getting her PhD. Her mother just celebrated eighteen years sober; they'd given it more pomp and circumstance than they would have for her birthday, because it seemed a more important thing to celebrate. There'd been a car accident, she thinks stupidly, when she'd been much younger, on her way home from gymnastics. She was eight. She'd touched her head and came away with blood smeared darkly across her fingertips, and then her mother said, _look, Amelia-Bedelia,_ and held up her arm, broken cleanly in the middle. She flopped it back and forth, laughing like it was comedy gold, completely oblivious to how the bone shredded through her skin as it scraped around like a hinge. She never touched alcohol after that -- well, she did, because it's never that easy, but Amelia never stopped being proud of her.

Her mother is dead.

(She checks Google Crisis Response. She thinks about clicking on "I'm searching for someone …" but if she started listing names, she isn't sure she could stop. Instead, she hits "I have information on someone …" and there it is, for anyone who enters her name. Amelia Ritter is alive.)

Her father is dead.

(She files with the Red Cross.)

(And anybody else she can think of.)

Everyone she knows is dead. She was born in Orinda, she went to Stanford for undergraduate and graduate, she's never moved further away than fifty miles from this very spot. Why would she? Everything she needed is here. And now it's gone.

They're calling it The Trespasser.

She stops walking, because there it is. One pile of rubble jumbled in with the others, but some hindbrain part of her recognizes the wallpaper, peeled-off and dusty at her feet, and sense memory immediately builds the rest of the house up around it, the hallways, the staircases, the rooms she played hide-and-seek in and the entryway where she kissed her first boy at age fifteen, and she doesn't know how she could have gotten it confused with any other.

Her feet take her to the kitchen.

She stoops, pulling at the corner of something yellow and soft caught under a chunk of cinder. It's a dandelion-print dishtowel.

She drops to her knees.

She spreads her hands, her arms, wishes for rain in a way she can't explain but all the rain in the Bay Area will be toxic now. The trees here will glow. The wildlife will die. She should not be out. Nobody listens, of course, because what else are you going to do after nuclear strike but crawl across the anthill that used to be yours and wish for it all to go away?

She wails.

She wails and wails and rocks and wails, a pulse, a pulse, a siren call.

Danger, danger, this is a barren land. 

Here 

the women are 

wailing.

 

**february 2014.**

Mark Zuckerberg was not in California when Trespasser came.

Mark Zuckerberg has never been to California, although he hears it's very nice, you know, before someone someone _someone_ made the decision to use a nuclear weapon and turn ten cities with dense populations to cinder and ashfall -- tens of thousands of people who never got a say, never got a chance, were still standing in the street and in their homes when they were blasted away, leaving only their silhouettes on the walls.

More people died from the attempts to stop the monster than anybody did from the monster itself.

That's not the bit people are going to remember later, though. 

Victors are very particular about editing history.

Mark Zuckerberg was in line at the bank when it happened, and he wasn't thinking about how today was the last day of life as he knows it -- he's thinking about the easiest way to get to the DMV from here because he has approximately four hours before his payment is late and he starts driving on expired plates, when the woman in front of him gasps at whatever's on her phone like somebody'd splashed her with cold water and, right along with everybody else, Mark progresses into that moment without ever being back to go back to the one before.

He lives with a man named Dustin in a small, young neighborhood in Baltimore, a little off-center of where everything happens, where the new, economically-designed apartment blocks haven't settled into their paint yet and trendy fro-yo shops share snug retail space with boutiques called Canvas&Cabernet that offer wine-tasting and art classes to the bored middle class who drive in from the suburbs. There's a movie theater that does discounted 9am showings of the current blockbusters for the students who have classes at noon. A nondenominational church on the office block has a sign outside its door that advertises its 8:30 service and an 11:30 service, all online.

Mark's here for the same reason anybody winds up anywhere -- he followed somebody else.

Dustin had a business idea, and Mark's his best friend and also very good at coding, which Dustin's passable at because Dustin's the kind of person who becomes passable at everything he tries, although no one would ever call him particularly gifted at any one thing. So when Dustin said, "Hey, so, Baltimore?" sometime after they got their bachelor's degrees, Mark shrugged and said, "sure," and that was that.

They live in a fourth-floor apartment with a balcony that overlooks a barren construction lot and code street-savvy apps they sell on Google Play. They help each other remember the names of other people's girlfriends and they agree they need to get more reliable dishware soon and they text each other when something they want goes on discount on Steam, even when they're sitting together at the kitchen table. Mark has a girlfriend -- Mark is the type of person who always has a girlfriend, just settles into one like a cat sitting down in a patch of sunshine, and puts in the minimum amount of effort to maintain the relationship -- and Dustin has a dating profile. Each person who messages him is his new favorite person. They both have automatic payments set up on their PayPals -- $20 a month goes to the Red Cross to help with reconstruction in the Bay Area.

Then, six months after the fact -- when people like Mark and Dustin, who knew nobody in California and therefore had the luxury of forgetting about what happened there for days at a time, stopped thinking about it -- a second trespasser surfaces from beneath the Pacific Ocean and makes landfall in Manilla.

It's K-Day that everybody remembers, later, standing around and talking about what they were doing when it happened (in line at the bank, he had a Krispy Kreme doughnut for breakfast that morning,) but for Mark, this is the day that fossilizes inside of him.

It's the moment that "oh, Jesus, that's horrible," becomes "oh no, _again?"_

And whole chunks of the world might as well have fissured and broken off into the sea, because that's what it feels like. The geography of their lives are never the same.

 

**july 2014.**

His parents discuss their plans to move inland.

His mother has a cousin who skis in Montana. She's a dentist. So they're talking about buying a lodge up there, something where the whole family can relocate permanently. They're going to have to live on top of each other, sure, but they'll live on top of each other in safety, thousands of miles inland from the sea.

They didn't know anybody in the Philippines, either, or in Mexico, and tragedy doesn't feel like tragedy when it happens to somebody else, far away from where you can see it. But it's a game of "yet." 

They haven't lost anybody _yet._

"Think about it, Mark," his mother tells him.

"Montana, though?" he tucks the phone against his shoulder. "What's even in Montana? I've never been further west than, like, Ohio. I'm okay with that, frankly."

"The way things are going --" Urgency makes his mother's voice sharp. "Nobody's going to want to the live on the coasts except for the people who have no choice about it." Poor people, she means, but isn't gauche enough to say it. "Montana's really big. There's lot of room."

That summer, while Mark and Dustin are busy putting together a virtual aquarium app for the 3-year and under demographic who live along the Pacific Rim and aren't going to grow up to see the wildlife for themselves thanks to the effects of the trespasser's poisonous secretions, his sister secures a contracting job in Wyoming. 

"Is that one not Montana?" is his comment on that one. "Which one's which? I can't even tell."

She rolls her eyes. "You think you're funny," she says. "But you're just being a dick."

He shrugs modestly.

She's going out there to build homesteads in places nobody had given much thought to before. "That kind of real estate is beyond valuable now," she says. "People are going to want to migrate away from the trespasser's hunting grounds, and they're going to want places to go. As weird as it is to think, a lot of the American West is still untouched -- at least from a developer's point of view, I don't know, there are some conservationists with stupid opinions. I'm really excited about this, Mark. This is -- this is -- like, my life investment. This is what I'm going to _do."_

She stands in the middle of his apartment in boots she got from the men's side of Target and WD-40 under her nails and offers to take him with her.

He folds his arms, drumming his fingers against his own ribs and looking out the window, where the Maryland rain is making mud out of the construction site below. There have been three trespassers in the past year: there's a YouTube channel that does sock puppets, and they did a Godzilla parody, perhaps a little insensitively soon, only they spent the whole episode deliberately avoiding saying "Gojira" -- spent whole scenes setting it up, and then pitfall into another word entirely. It's the kind of name that gets stuck in your head, though.

Kaiju.

"The breach is in the Pacific," he points out. "Aren't we safe here?"

"That's a really stupid question. Who's to say the breach is going to stay where it is?"

 

**november 2014.**

"What's that face for?" says the man kicking off his sandals just inside the door, shivering in his basketball shorts. He is not thinking about kaiju. He is thinking about tuna, perhaps diced up with pickles and chick peas, but only if he feels like going that far. He is twenty-nine years old and can't really eat like that without consequences, but he also hates the idea of making anything that will result in a dish he has to clean later.

Dustin, in the chair, shakily extends the envelope. "We've been drafted."

 

**november 2014, cont.**

There's an old woman who lives in a house at the top of a hill. In the dark, the snow piles up fifteen feet against her windows and doors and she has to call Mackie from the town below if she wants to be dug out again. He'll do it for $20, a cigarette, and a bag of dried dates that she orders special from the World Wide Web. His Egyptian wife likes to suck on them when she's nervous or when her cancer hurts.

She knows where everything is in her house, here on her island in the middle of the sea. Nothing much has needed to be moved in twenty-so years.

Her American name is Sue and her government tells her there's not enough housing available on site for all of the people who've come to work on the Jaeger Program and she's going to have to accept a lodger or two, sorry for the inconvenience, and she thinks about complaining, something something, isn't there something about that in the Fourth Amendment, but really, it's just her in a big old house that her husband built for her in 1956 in the style that all the white magazines had favored then. She'd been married in an ivory-colored dress and her husband hadn't known how to undo the hooks in her corset.

Her house is one block uphill from the shuttle stop, one of three that's been installed in Kodiak to ferry workers to and from the site that's going to be the Jaeger facility. It has a tiny, sunny attic room with two twin beds that Sue had been imagining would be good for grandchildren. She changes the sheets and smooths down the paisley-print down comforters and checks her pantry and tells the PPDC that she can sustain two lodgers. Any more and they'll have to pay her some kind of rent.

Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskowitz come from the East Coast (Sue doesn't know anything about it. "Is New York over there somewhere?" she asks them politely the first night. Ten years from now, there will be a noticeable divide between the Atlantic-bred Americans who've never had anything to fear, and the Pacific-bred Americans whose knowledge of anything outside of the immediate danger zone is hazy at best, because how important can those places be, really? There won't be much united about the United States of America. But that hasn't happened yet. Give it time, give it fear,) and they're almost never in those beds, but when they are, she goes in the next morning and makes them up and puts fresh-cut lavender on their pillows to ward against malevolence.

She laughs at Mark the first time he shrugs at her offer of a heavier coat, saying he'll be fine. His bare legs look like a chicken's, skinny and bony.

The next day, he takes the coat from her without a word. She chuckles merrily about it all the way through until the six o'clock news.

"Alaska will make men out of all fools," she tells him when he and Dustin come home, ice crystals in their hair and frost hoaring their nostrils.

She is a little old widow who was married to a Japanese whaler for forty-five years. Her desktop background on her home computer is an aerial shot of the gory, bombed-out carcass of the Mexican kaiju, its blue-grey viscera strewn across the white-sand beach. 

She thinks it's beautiful. She hopes to see many more.

 

Mark and Dustin have laminated badges that get them through a couple different security-locked doors on campus. Officially, they rank somewhere in the PR department, which Dustin is never _not_ going to find funny.

The Pan-Pacific Defense Corps hired them to code for their official .gov website -- but not because they're especially brilliant coders. They aren't. At least not anymore. Maybe they were when they were younger, but now if you want _true_ innovation, you should look to the young minds coming out of the Philippines. No, they were picked because they were _fast,_ and if there's one thing the PPDC cares about right now, it's the speed of the human machine.

And Mark and Dustin had, after all, gotten Facemash up in a single night.

Who knew that getting put on academic probation his sophomore year at Harvard for being a sexist dickhole was _actually_ going to matter later in life? The Ad Board warned him it would, sure, but Mark hadn't _really_ believed them.

("Figures," Erica will say wryly, later.)

It's Mark, Dustin, and approximately five other people, working out of an office that still smells like sawdust, with one half of a board table, wire plastic chairs that remind Mark of the kind they make you wait in at the DMV, and a glass window that overlooks the other side of the hallway and one big U-Dump-It. By the end of the first week, Mark has that window entirely covered in Dry-Erase code.

 

**january 2015.**

They strap a young soldier into the first completed jaeger in order to test drive it.

He dies.

Waiting in another room, fingers poised over his tablet to make the update to the millions and millions of waiting visitors on the website, Mark looks across at Pearl, who is there to do the same on the Chinese language site, and asks, "How do we phrase that?"

"Fuck," she answers.

 

**july 2015.**

A woman sits across from him in the mess, where the walls are gunmetal grey and the albatross of the PPDC spreads its knife-point wings fifty feet across the wall. Her cap sits firmly on the front of her head like a flag planted in the surface of an orbiting moon, with her hair roped into a coil beneath it. She wears the olive-green fatigues of a cadet, and on her tray, she has the same standard-issued potatoes, meat, and juice box that he does.

"Who fell asleep on their ass and thought it was a good idea to let you handle any kind of PR?" she asks, because she is a nice person. "Were they _high?"_

"Thank you, Erica," he replies. "And no. Once the site was coded and live, all it needed was maintenance, and we could all do that in our sleep --"

"Something tells me you probably were, knowing your sleeping habits."

"-- and what we _really_ needed were more personnel who could translate the site into other languages to make it more globally available, but reorganizing their infrastructure isn't really a priority for the PPDC right now. And there's nobody in charge of online PR -- they've got a talking head for the news, of course, but somehow they forgot that the Internet exists -- and so they literally turned to us and said, can't you do it?"

"Wow," Erica drags it out, widening her eyes at him. "I have a lot of faith in our new allied governments."

"Shut up," he says without heat, kicking his feet in between hers beneath the table. This mess hall is the smaller of the two on campus, being the one meant for nonservice personnel -- the nonessentials, basically, people like Mark and Erica who are not involved in the actual construction, design, and programming of the Mark I jaegers. Erica's among the first civilians selected for pilot training, but they don't need those yet. "I'm actually not that bad. People _do_ change since college. I can be professional. You've seen the Twitter account, right? That's me."

"I have," says Erica lightly. "And I suppose now would be a bad time to mention that I run the parody account."

" _You --"_ Mark jerks upright, upending his fork with his elbow and sending it skittering across the table. "You …" he lowers his voice. "You _fucker,"_ he gets out, because he's the oldest of four and vulgarity still doesn't come naturally to him. Fraternities almost beat it out of him. Almost. But she deserves the word, because she has more followers than he does, and he runs the _official kaiju-punching robot Twitter._ How is that fair?

She throws her head back and laughs.

 

**august 2015.**

The whole building shivers whenever they practice a jaeger drop, new-building sawdust cascading from the ceiling and pens leaping a few centimeters in one direction.

They get warnings before it happens; the lights dim, the power diverted into launching the jaeger, and everyone in Mark and Dustin's office become really adept at grabbing folders or sheafs of paper and covering their heads to keep the dust from getting into their eyes. They're working on constructing several battle facilities designed purely for housing, restoring, and equipping jaegers, scattered across the Pacific Rim. They're calling them Shatterdomes, and Mark, personally, can't wait for them to go live. He's getting tired of finding sawdust in his Red Bull whenever he finally finds his way back to it.

His girlfriend at the time is a robotics engineer named Christy Lee, whose husband died in the Philippines attack. She has the kaiju's name, Hundun, tattooed on the inside of her right arm as a reminder, though he doesn't think she'll ever forget.

They're bored with each other a lot of the time, and their relationship runs largely on their mutual disdain over whatever delay some bellyaching opposition group is posing to stop the Jaeger Program (they weren't complaining very hard when the first jaeger to be piloted by two pilots stopped Karloff in Vancouver, now were they?) and how the fuck Great Britain became an important part of the Pan-Pacific Alliance, considering it isn't, you know, _located in the Pacific at all._ Complaining is their favorite past-time, and they're very happy with each other when they're bitching about somebody else.

They're also formidable at Cards Against Humanity -- nothing is sacred to them.

"Favorite part of working with the PPDC?" he goes, thumbing at his tablet to keep it awake.

She thinks about it, mouth skewed to one side, but not for very long.

"I love that condoms are part of our rations," she says. "They're not bad, either. Have you taken one and gone up to the launch platform -- the wind's fucking terrible up there, but if you shake one out and hold it up, it balloons out --"

"This is a family-friendly Tweet, Christy!"

Her eyes glitter, buoyed by the sight of him laughing. "You asked!"

"I need something that's … like, taking the whole experience of building a jaeger, knowing that it's the only thing that's going to come between a city of millions of people -- why do they only target big cities? Has anyone figured that out yet?"

"No, Mark, we tend to kill them before interrogating them, which I hear is counterproductive."

"-- and a kaiju, and putting it online, where people can access it. We're very remote up here. If people don't see it, they'll forget to believe in it."

She stills, then tilts her head.

"Can you do that?"

He looks up.

"Can you make that? For the site? Build that kind of interactive element? I can help you design it if authenticity is a concern." Her voice quiets. "I know a lot of people who would love for a chance to punch a kaiju, and if they can't do it in real life, they'd love to do it on a computer screen."

And so for a few days, Mark and Dustin stay awake late into the night, trading ideas back and forth between Sue's twin beds, and he gets an e-mail sent out to a friend of Genji's who works for PopCap Games, gauging interest in collaboration, but never gets any further than that.

Because this is the week he gets a summons from Caitlin Lightcap's office.

And this?

This is the third moment. The second moment was the day Hundun attacked Manilla, the moment Mark's life progressed cleanly over one line and into something else entirely. And this is the third. The third line erased, and the Mark Zuckerberg that existed before it will never exist again.

 

**august 2015, cont.**

Everything in Caitlin Lightcap's offices are exactly how she left it, even though she spends most of her time in the Jaeger Academy with the newest Rangers these days; the first graduates, the pairs from Russia, China, Japan, America, and Fiji respectively, in clumsy, bulky jaegers that are nonetheless better, bigger, and stronger than any defense they've tried to mount against the kaiju before. She became a pilot herself mostly by accident, by being the only one capable of drifting with Sergio D'onofrio before he died the same way the first test pilot did. No one after her drifted as well with him as she. But there's nobody capable of replacing her at the administrative level, either, so her offices remain fossilized, and Mark honestly has no idea who he's going in to meet.

"Enter," calls a voice.

He pushes through the door, snapping his heels to attention. The Alaskan summer sun burns at his eyes coming in through the high, wide window, before the ice-white corona of it fades away and he sees the silhouette of a woman standing there, looking out across the proving grounds.

For a second, for no fathomable reason at all, he thinks it's the Prime Minister of Peru, but then she turns and of course it isn't.

She's taller than him, the way most women are, with a rounded face, thin nose, and sweeping black hair cut sharply at her chin. She smiles in greeting, an easy, open smile that hikes up the beauty mark in her cheek. She's not dressed in uniform.

"Hello, Mark," she says.

"Ma'am," he answers. "And you are?"

"I'm Marilyn. Please have a seat."

He starts forward to do that, when he catches a glimpse of what she'd been looking at through the window, and finds himself derailed. He comes around the desk, touching his fingers to the windowframe like it's the pitching railing of a ship. Out on the proving grounds, one of the jaegers is disassembled, lying in four easy pieces on the muddy summer ground. Another jaeger -- the Fijians', if he's not mistaken -- stands over it, helping a small, ant-like crew of technicians pound out the dents.

Mark never gets to see this, since his days are always spent below in the anthill.

"What happened?" he goes, nodding to the beat-up jaeger on the ground. "Did they run into a mountain?"

"You'd think they'd see those coming," she acknowledges wryly. "And yet it happens. Usually those are the kind of repairs we'd do inside, but since none of the hydraulics were severely damaged and it's just cosmetic, we thought we'd let the Kaurs … practice their open-heart surgery, so to speak. It helps the pilots learn finer motor control."

She pulls out Lightcap's chair, settling into it, and after a moment, prompts him with a, "Mark?"

"Right, yeah," he says absently. "Can I --" he gestures, and she gestures back, and since he doesn't quite know what that gesture means, he goes ahead and takes the chair from the other side of the desk and pulls it around so that he can still watch outside the window. The winter's snow has melted off everywhere except for the mountain peaks, scattered frost-tipped across the iron-grey sea.

"Mark," Marilyn prompts again, and this time, he does turn to face her. She has a folder in her hand. "Do you remember taking these?"

She extends the folder out to him. He takes it from her, scanning the page on the top and recognizing his own handwriting.

"Yeah," he goes, lifting it and seeing a similar page beneath it, though the color of ink and the date is different. "These are the questionnaires you had all personnel on campus complete. These are for the Pons system, right? You were trying to come up with a suitable test that would determine drift capability in potential pilots."

"Yes. Did they tell you who I am?"

He looks up. He shakes his head.

"I'm the voir dire specialist."

Mark thins his eyes. "Witness examination?" His first thought is, _Am I being court martialed?_ His second is, _Can I even be court martialed?_ His third is, _Oh, man, if I get court martialed on a military base without actually being part of the military, my mom's going to kill me._ His fourth is, _My mom can't kill me, I'm thirty years old, I can take her in a fight._

In the time it takes him to cycle through these, her face crinkles up a little bit in surprise. "Well, yes," she says. "That's what I took the bar exam for, but I'm not using the law terminology for it here." She folds her hands, and Mark just barely makes out the edge of ink underneath the third-quarter sleeve of her suit jacket, and wonders if, like Christy, she wears her gravestones on her skin. "What goes for judging a person's character when they go up in front of a jury is remarkably similar to what goes for judging whether or not a person is drift compatible."

To his credit, Mark Zuckerberg is not a stupid person.

"Me?" he gets out, and even though he's sitting down, a tremble goes through his knees. "But I'm not a cadet."

And Marilyn Delpy, who he will later learn hand-picked almost all of the Jaeger Academy's best pilots -- the the mother-daughter pair from the Fijian islands, the Hansen brothers from Sydney, the Winklevosses, the Vietnamese newlyweds, those damnable Beckets -- smiles at him and asks, "Would you like to be?"

Later, as they're walking down to the office where he and Dustin and Genji and Pearl and all the other programmers have been cooped up for months so that Mark can gather his things, she takes his water bottle from him because he's shaking too hard, and he blurts out, entirely without meaning to, "I'm not as young as the average cadet, I'm -- I'm not likable, I've never been likable, and isn't your drift system based entirely on a person's ability to empathize with another? I'm really, _really_ not empathetic."

"Your history speaks otherwise," she tells him, gently. "Sometimes the most empathetic people are the most unlikable."

He swallows, his dry throat clicking.

"If I'm wrong," she offers, with a note in her voice that says she's confident she's not. "Then you'll scrub out. It's a grueling program, designed to weed away all those except the _most_ capable. Trust it to get rid of you if you're not pilot material."

"And my co-pilot?"

"Would you like to recommend somebody for the program?" she asks easily. "Someone you think you'd be drift compatible with?"

Mark thinks about it, but really, it's a stupid question.

"Dustin Moskowitz," he says. "We've been roommates since our sophomore year at Harvard. He's my best friend. I -- I mean, I know his bank account information."

Dustin is probably the one person in the world Mark can safely say he knows better than anybody else, although he doesn't know how it's going to hold up to inspection. What if it's not enough? What if drift compatibility is contingent on things like knowing every little detail? Mark probably can't tell you what Dustin's mother and fathers' given names are, but he can tell you all eight of Dustin's favorite tricks on Rainbow Road.

"Or my sister," he offers, and Marilyn makes a note of it, still holding his water bottle. "She's in Wyoming, building safe houses."

There's Christy, too, he supposes. He doesn't know her as well, but they're so alike that if you were going to take the brain of one person and meld it with the brain of another in order to get something strong enough to pilot an enormous robot and pound kaiju into pulp, his and Christy's would be a safe bet. But whereas Mark is pretty sure he can be scratched out of the PR department and no one will miss him, the same probably can't be said for Christy in Engineering. He's expendable. She's not.

Dustin sees them coming through the glass. He stands. His shirt today is green and says, "Don't Leave Your Trash Out for Your Mother to Clean Up," and features a sick-looking Earth, piles of garbage visibly pocked into the screen-print.

"Hey, how'd it --" his mouth starts over the words, and then pauses when Marilyn follows Mark through the door.

"Hello, Dustin," she says. "Can I have a word with you?"

 

**december 2015.**

A kaiju comes out of the breach, noticeably bigger and stronger than any kaiju that's come out before, to the point that it prompts the PPDC to immediately create a category system to accommodate it. It's the first Category II kaiju the world has seen. Cherno Alpha and Noble Vindicator meet it off the coast of Colombia and destroy it in a near-flawless victory. A victory parade is held in Washington DC, and another in Vladivostok. The Winklevoss twins shake hands with the President, solemn and straight-backed and disgustingly perfect. Aleksis Kaidonovsky towers intimidatingly over Vladimir Putin, and his co-pilot smiles at the cameras as thin as blades.

It's not Mark's job to cover these things anymore.

And it doesn't matter, because the week before the nonessentials get holiday leave, Dustin scrubs out of the Jaeger Program without ever making the first cut.

"I'm sorry, man," he goes, rubbing at his face with the flats of his hands. The other cadets in their barracks are polite enough to give them a little space, though Mark really doesn't see the point. A lot of the cots are empty -- 75% of recruits are sent home before the first officers are chosen. This isn't surprising, but Mark screamed at the training officer who called it in a way he's never screamed at anyone before.

He stood down, though, when he was told to stand down.

"I'm sorry," says Dustin again, which is stupid, because everybody here knows that in that moment, Mark chose being a pilot, being _important,_ over keeping Dustin, and the force of the apology he's not saying has his throat in a chokehold. "I'm not -- I was never confrontational. I don't like the idea of punching as a form of communication," he chuckles weakly. "I'd probably let the kaiju just walk right on past. I just want to build things."

"Are you staying in Alaska, though, at least?"

"Yeah, of course." Dustin grins, turning his mouth into a cage of teeth. "I'm actually getting a promotion."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. _When_ you make Ranger, I'm going to be there to code for your jaeger. After all," he adopts the heavy pidgin accent of their training officer, who's from New Zealand and was in Sydney the day Scissure demolished it. Everyone swears there's a ghost of kaiju blue in his eyes. "Dem tings run on computers, ya?"

 

**march 2016.**

If the third most important moment in Mark's life was the day Marilyn Delpy recommended him for the Jaeger Program, and the second was the day that everybody sat down in front of their TVs and computers and _knew_ that Trespasser was not a one-time event and everything was going to have to change, then the first happened in an unassuming bar to an unassuming eighteen-year-old boy with a chip on his shoulder the size of an oceanic shelf, when a girl turned away from the door and came back to say to him, "Let me explain to you everything you said _wrong_ just now."

He probably doesn't know it, and Erica doesn't either, because to them, it's just another moment in their lives, one that progressed from _now_ to _then_ without much fanfare at all. They have no way of knowing that if Erica had left him alone at that tiny table in that crowded bar, that if Erica had the courage to leave while she still had the devastating last word, then both their lives would have turned out drastically different.

Mark Zuckerberg would have been in California that day.

And Mark Zuckerberg would be dead.

So it's no surprise at all, not really, that Erica Albright bears her teeth at him on the other side of the Pons as they're stickering the nodes into place and says, "Are you ready, Ranger Zuckerberg?"

It's a stupid question, but that's not the point.

"Ready, Ranger Albright," he returns, and the door shuts behind the retreating techs. "Time to find out just how horrible BU really was."

"Oh, shut up," she laughs, and everything tumbles, kaleidoscopic, into the blue.

 

(Here is the thing

that Mark Zuckerberg does not know. Here is the thing

that Marilyn Delpy saw in him.

Mark Zuckerberg is not a perfect jaeger pilot because he's very big or very strong or very athletic. He is not a Winklevoss. He is the perfect jaeger pilot because he has no defenses -- he just pretends he does, and those mean absolutely nothing in the drift.

He has no concept of privacy, and has nothing to hide, and he never grew out of that age where he assumed nobody else did, either, so his mind goes knocking into other's without the slightest consideration that they might not be on the same level he is.

Whereas drifting with some people

is like getting lost in the sea

like standing in the surf just to feel the ground swamped out from underneath you with the receding wave

drifting with Mark Zuckerberg is like getting dropped into a university building you've never been in before, five minutes late for an important presentation and unable to find the right room. His head is a corridor, a labyrinth of hallways that take three right turns just to take a left and room numbers that don't progress in any logical order. Every door burns brightly blue in the drift, a RABIT begging to be chased. Every door is unlocked. Mark Zuckerberg has never wanted to keep anybody out. It's just that nobody ever bothered looking in.

Erica Albright flickers in and out of hallways.

_Well,_

she thinks

_I knew that architectural engineering degree was going to come in handy one day._

It takes three tries, them shuddering in and out of sync

("We're not getting neural handshake, pull the plug --"

"No, wait!" shouts Marilyn Delpy,)

waking up and plunging back into the blue again, before the corridors flatten, the maze vanishes,

and Mark Zuckerberg and Erica Albright, in perfect synchrony,

lift their middle fingers

to everybody watching.)

 

**march 2016, cont.**

Phantom Culture is a Mark-I jaeger with plasma vents built vertically into its chest, giving it the look of a creature whose wailing mouth is dripping off of it. Each jaeger is built to smash, punch, annihilate, and shred through a kaiju's thick plated skin, but each jaeger also has its own unique advantage coded specifically for it, because no kaiju comes out of the breach exactly the same, either. 

"Phantom Culture" is its official, sanctioned PPDC name, but scuttlebutt calls it Facemash, because everyone knows it's going to be Erica and Mark's jaeger when it's complete, and Erica's made sure everyone knows _that_ story, because Erica is a wonderful human being who's going to guarantee that Mark makes absolutely no friends of the female persuasion. ("You dug that grave by comparing them to farm animals, you lie in it," is her cheerful response to his complaints.)

"It's designed to go for the gills -- that's what this is for, this button here -- _here,_ right where I'm pointing. Go for the gills, incapacitate them, and cut off one method of the kaiju's retreat. It'll stick near the surface if it can't breathe underwater, Noble Vindicator taught us that. It'll be your signature move!"

Dustin pinwheels his hands around excitedly as he talks. His hair is trimmed short, dusky-colored and receding ever-so-slightly, but Mark's not about to tell him that. He's wearing service blues, and he doesn't eat in the same mess as Mark anymore. They both have their own quarters here now, and somedays, Mark stands out in the bitter, early-spring cold and closes his eyes to the ice-white sunlight on the backs of his eyelids and imagines that he's back in Sue's bright attic bedroom. The memory's changed, of course; he's pretty sure the pillows at Sue's didn't have little teddy bears on them. Erica's grandmother's did.

Mark, not for the first time, is glad that Dustin washed out of the Jaeger program. What he's doing now is a much, much larger version of app-making.

"What'll the signature move be called?" he asks.

"We," Dustin gestures to the other technicians in the room, "are calling it a sense of humor. Since you don't have one, we figured we better build you one."

Behind him, Erica barks laughter.

 

**may 2016.**

In Japan, Tamsin Sevier has a seizure and collapses in the drift and Stacker Pentecost is left to pilot Coyote Tango alone. A single girl survives.

After, Tamsin is bloodless, grey and pulled in tight, her hair thinning into chunks, and they keep Stacker in her hospital room as his burns heal into scars, and their proximity to each other helps them sleep. She cannot come to Sasha and Aleksis's wedding, so they all come to her, instead, wheeling her out into the hospital garden so that they can be married there. The Kaidanovskys, instead of kissing each other when prompted, both fold on down from their considerable height to kiss Tamsin on each cheek, and she laughs, the sound as broken and soaring as a jaybird.

Nobody needs to ask what's going on. Nobody talks about it. Radiation poisoning is something they're all becoming very familiar with, after the contamination in California and Manilla.

They all used the same equipment. They all strapped into the same testing gear. They've all been exposed to uncontained nuclear power.

It wasn't supposed to happen this quickly.

 

**november 2016.**

The new Alaska Shatterdome sits squat and square on the coast of the Gulf of Alaska, 400 miles northeast of Kodiak Island, where Mark has lived for the past two years. Mark and Erica relocate there when Phantom Culture does, along with almost everybody else they know. Stacker Pentecost stays behind at the Academy, and so does Marilyn Delpy, who has a whole generation of future pilots to select.

In the Shatterdome, everybody wears the same uniform -- technician, engineer, custodial, or pilot, it doesn't matter, they're all doing the same vital work -- but it becomes common practice to wear one's country's flag as a patch on their sleeves, right underneath the standard PPDC emblem. It's a good reminder that, even as the Pan-Pacific Alliance begins to blur at the borders and workers are shuttled from Shatterdome to Shatterdome, wherever they're most needed, you can't forget the country that raised you, the countries you've come to defend. At the Academy, Mark learned Chinese and Tagalog just to get by, and never quite picked up Japanese, but he did learn all the good curse words and how to cast aspirations on someone else's dick size, which is all you need to know, really.

The first time Phantom Culture is deployed against a kaiju, Mark finds himself in the cockpit, feeling almost like he wound up there by accident, focusing on the strangest things.

The tech who's finishing strapping him into his suit wears the Brazilian flag, and his eyes keep on snagging on it every time he turns.

His brain feels like it's made of static, a panicked mess of greyscale.

"You're a long way from home," he hears himself say, and taps the end of a glove against the patch. In five minutes, he's going to be fighting for his life and Erica's life and the lives of millions of people.

The tech stills for a beat, then he turns and shoves his goggles up his forehead, exposing upturned, foxlike eyes and features that scatter inside Mark's memory like they're looking for a place to settle. Then he grins at Mark, and it's that, the sight of his teeth and the way every part of his face crinkles with the joy of it, that sends recognition careening into Mark with the force of a fist.

"You --"

"I volunteered," says Eduardo Saverin.

"-- how did you --" He hasn't seen Eduardo in twelve years; he remembers a grey suit, a grey carry-on bag, and an equally grey good-bye, delivered the day before Eduardo left for a summer internship in New York that turned him into somebody Mark didn't really care to know anymore. They saw each other after that, of course, but that's the last encounter that felt like it meant anything. Friendships deteriorate, they fall apart. They're organic. They rot. "How did you -- here -- in my jaeger?"

"I volunteered for that, too," says Eduardo. "Marilyn said it'd be good for you to have someone you know here." LOCCENT crackles over the comms, Narendra's voice sharp and urgent and competent, and Erica replies, and Eduardo speaks very quickly into the gap between their voices, "So you better hurry back, got it? You know it takes twice as long to get you guys out of these things as it does to get you into them."

"I'll try not to inconvenience you," Mark says faintly.

"Good." And then for no reason, he says, "Mark."

 

(Up close, the kaiju's eyes are blue

blue

blue

and horrible and _real_ and so very

cold.)

 

**august 2017.**

"Yeah, this is going to be the part they skip when they make that movie about your life," Eduardo's voice scrapes dryly against his ears. Other voices come and go, but Mark listens to this one. 

Something burns hot against the bare skin of his back, and the tracks in Mark's brain leap, cross, and trip, leaving him convinced that those are claws sinking into Phantom's vertebral column and that heat is something vital combusting, but it isn't, of course -- it's only antiseptic and Mark cannot distinguish between metal and skin. His spine in ridged in bite marks from being thrown against the spinal clamp, bleeding sluggishly.

"They're not going to make a movie on my life, Wardo, don't be stupid," he says. "I'm not hero material. They'll make a movie about the Winklevosses. They're better suited for it. They're handsome. That's all anybody cares about."

He doesn't have a shirt. Why doesn't he have a shirt?

Erica's too far away. It's uncomfortable and it pulls, the distance, like being made to do the splits when you're not very flexible. You cannot take a brain and separate it, that's not good for it. He is the left hemisphere and she is the right, and she is too far away.

A shirt presses itself into his hands. It's Eduardo's.

"You still wear shirts like this?" seems like a relevant thing to ask, somehow. His fingers find the buttons, tracing the contours of them, the little bumps of thread. Sense memory confuses him; buttons in the console, bumps in the scales of kaiju flesh, and he quickly curls his fingers up against his palm.

Jaegers feel pain. 

_Why did you code me with that?_ he'd asked Dustin, sitting high up in the scaffolding and watching Christy's crew scale up and down and around the bent, broken hydraulics of Phantom's left arm, courtesy of a Category II named Blackwing who got as far as Puget Sound before Mark and Erica and the Canadians got to it. In the infirmary bay, Phantom actually looks her proper size -- lately, she's been sharing a bay with a brand-new Mark III jaeger named Gipsy Danger, who dwarfs her so much it's comical.

_Self-preservation,_ Dustin answered, apologetic. 

_Like a sense of humor, I don't have any?_

_Oh, no, bro, you got plenty of self-preservation. You're like a cockroach. You never came out with me to midnight releases of things, remember? If that's not interest in the survival of the species, I don't have a better example. But a jaeger isn't a robot -- it's, okay, quoting Iron Man here, it's high-tech prosthesis, it's body armor, and we need you to make sure it doesn't get injured. So we have to train you with pain._

 

**august 2018.**

"What was in the box?"

"Hmm?" he goes, and the vibration of it shudders all the way through to his chest, which makes her squirm and shake her hair back, ticklish.

She settles back down against his sternum, snaking her arms underneath his ribs, and they both exhale in tandem. "Didn't you get a box from your parents today?"

He did. He shifts around, careful not to dislodge her, and pulls the little box out from where it got trapped between his pillow and the wall. From it, he extracts a small, greyish figurine, which he then marches across her arm up to her shoulder and the heavy cloth of her coat. It's a miniature Phantom Culture figurine, and Erica laughs as he proceeds to bend its arms back and forth against her cheek, complete with subvocal sound effects.

"Apparently," he says, when she wrestles it from him and returns the assault; he shields his face from the fake plasma emission. "It was given to my youngest cousin at the doctor's office, as a treat for being so brave about getting her vaccinations."

"What good taste," Erica says with great dignity.

Her phone buzzes against his hip, and she closes her eyes for a long beat, letting them do nothing but breathe in easy synchrony, before she fishes it out to check.

"Anything important?" he wants to know.

"Just a Tweet," she replies. "Apparently the Winklevosses will be making an appearance in Seoul on Monday, so we should come check them out if we feel like being reminded just how short we are."

"Good for them."

If there's one thing Mark does _not_ like about being a jaeger pilot, it's probably the publicity. He sucks at it. He's always awful and awkward in interviews.

They've worked out a system, he and Erica, where Erica will do the on-camera appearances that the Pan-Pacific Alliance demands of them if Mark protects her while they're in the Shatterdome, because it's easier to put on a face for people who don't know them than it is to hide from people who do. Mark is very good at dodging nosy people -- Cameron and Tyler haven't caught him once, though there was that week involving swimsuits stolen from their lockers, when they literally tried to hunt him down every time they saw him -- and equally good at making people ask the wrong questions ("did you really break the Internet with a misogynistic meme when you were in college?" and not, "Hey, is Erica feeling better?")

"This sucks," she complains, drawing her legs up and curling the toes of her orange socks against the bed. "I wish they'd put you back in charge of the official Twitter. Unlike you, this person's actually funny."

"Hey!"

"And there's no point in parodying something that's already funny."

He contemplates shoving her to the floor. Sensing that thought become a plan to action, she braces herself before he can get any kind of leverage.

"Don't even think about it," she says, and he grins.

Instead, they wrap each other up in a cocoon's hold, closing their arms and elbows around each other's heads, and each fall of her eyelashes against his cheek is code, is poetry, and Mark Zuckerberg could write Erica Albright from the inside out.

 

**october 2020.**

When Mark makes it down to the mess, it's already so late that the lights are the barest hovering specter, dark and dim, and there's nobody left except for several of the custodians clustered around a table, playing cards while the youngest of them shoves a mop at the floor despondently behind them, clearly having drawn some kind of short straw. He crosses over to the window, dismayed to see freshly-cleaned, shining steel surfaces -- that'd probably be a no on dinner, then.

One of them spots him and trudges over. Her face lights up with recognition when she gets close enough.

"Hey, Ranger!" says Amy Ritter. She's a thin, compact girl and her hair color _might_ be blonde, although Mark's really just judging by her eyebrows, because he's only ever seen her when she's on duty and it's all crammed up under her hairnet. "I'm about to get my meal, do you want to sit with me?"

"I actually," he holds up his ration card. "Want to know if there's enough on here for … anything," he waves a hand at what's visible in the kitchens, which is a good lot of nothing. He should probably go to the C-store, but all they have there is stale dry goods that were probably packaged before K-Day.

Amy hooks her handheld off her belt and swipes his card. "I didn't see your wife today," she says.

"She's not my wife," Mark answers automatically, even though it's an old tease. Co-ed jaeger pilots who aren't related to each other? There's _always_ a betting pool on whether or not they're sexually involved, or dating, or whatever. The track record leans kind of heavily in that direction, anyway. The drift will do that to you. "She's my co-pilot. There's a lot less implied ownership involved. And no, she's …" He can't come up with a lie fast enough. "She's asleep."

"Still?"

Mark licks his lips, lizard-like, and says nothing.

"Well," goes Amy. "Use your psychic powers and ask her if she wants a condom or three Advil, because that's all your ration card's good for until rollover. Which is on Friday for you guys, right?"

Mark nods. "That's okay, that's what I thought." He doesn't usually run down on rations, not even when the budget cuts at the start of the year had them all tightening their belts. Mark got through college on Red Bull and tuna in a pop-top can, rationing was not a hardship. 

Silence quivers between them, trying to draw their attention to it. Mark doesn't know how to retreat. Could he ask Eduardo? Eduardo's the kind of person you ask for things. Mark had never needed to before.

Amy's mouth tips in the corner. "Grab a chair, Ranger, I'll be right back."

They take inventory of their trays and swap what needs to be swapped -- Amy scrapes his mashed potatoes onto her tray because they come with freeze-dried bacon bits and Mark keeps kosher only when he notices, and she forfeits her chocolate milk box in exchange. ("If anybody asks why food's still charging out of Raleigh Becket's ration card," she informs him when she plunks a second tray down in front of him with an air of great solemnity, "I trust you'll do the honorable thing," and the joke flattens itself along the tabletop, because neither of them want to laugh at it. Yancy Becket's ration card would have been cut up after his death, but Raleigh would have been issued a civilian card upon his discharge. Mark doesn't ask questions, but he's pretty sure somebody told him once that Amy was the first friend Raleigh made here.) Food sustainability crashed in the wake of the crumbling economy, though a lot of it also had to do with the sudden population boom of all those people moving to the flyover states and pushing out the farmers who couldn't afford to fight them. You can't tell rich people that, though, that it's their fault everyone's starving. No, blame the economy.

They eat in silence, and then Amy says, "Have I told you that I'm leaving?"

Mark's fork stills.

"I am," she tells her tray, and a smile fights its way across her mouth, and she continues excitedly, "I got a position working on the Wall. You know, the Anti-Kaiju Wall."

"I know what Wall," Mark says flatly, and nothing else.

Her shoulders straighten and even out, bearing the weight of his incredulity upon them. "I know you're a pilot, but you do understand how important this project is, don't you? To people like me? Mark, I lost _everyone_ when Trespasser came. That carcass lay there, not even ten miles from my parents' house, for _three days._ I can still _smell --"_

She cuts herself off.

He puts her chocolate milk back on her tray. She stabs it open with the little straw and sips at it, eyes closed.

"The Jaeger Program is amazing," she says quietly, when she's done. "I know that, I've been here, but it's so … remote. It's so … _private._ The livelihoods of _millions_ rely on the power of just a few men and women, and that -- that sits well with _nobody,_ not anymore. But the Wall? The Anti-Kaiju Wall? Mark, _anyone_ can build a wall. It's giving the average person on the Pacific Rim the chance to protect _themselves."_

"And do you think that the kaiju are just going to … see the Wall, and, like, give up?"

Amy doesn't say a word. The answer, of course, is _no,_ but she can't say it. That's what hope does.

 

**december 2021.**

"Hold on, something's not --"

"Shit!"

"Ranger Albright! Ranger Zuckerberg! Do you copy?"

"Shit!"

"They're out of sync, sir. They're out of sync!"

"Kill the launch! Cut it _now!_ You, scramble whoever's next on the roster, use the launch tube in Bay Two. Call up Los Angeles if you need to, just get a jaeger out there!"

"What the hell --"

_(the corridor is a white-sand beach. he doesn't recognize the room numbers. kaiju blue turns to rivulets in the sand beneath his feet, a burning hiss, a growl. it's not sand_

_it's the maw of a kaiju and it's coming to swallow him and mark opens his mouth into the blue of the drift it's blue it's kaiju blue_

_and screams_

_and)_

"It's Albright, sir, she's --"

"Contact the med bay."

"Yes, sir."

_(a RABIT a RABIT have you seen little peter cottontail? it's a RABIT and)_

_(two eighteen-year-old children sit at a postage-stamp table in a crowded bar. she is dressed in layers like each day she adds another stretch of the world to her body. he is dressed without any defenses at all, because he doesn't believe in them. they are frightening each other. they are frightening. they are frightening and angry and then_

_she is_

_gone)_

_(gone)_

_(and mark_

_is alone)_

One man in LOCCENT to another: "What do you mean, not again?"

"This is what happened to the Winklevosses, remember? No? Weren't you there? I thought you were."

"No. What happened?"

"This, pretty much, only it happened during patrol, not during a breach. We had to cut the patrol because they wouldn't sync, but when we tried again the next day, it worked just fine. We didn't think anything of it after that. And then they died, so it didn't happen again."

"Shit, man." A beat. "You know it's these Mark Is, right?"

"Yeah, I know. Why didn't they work on containment sooner?"

"If anything, their martyrdom is useful."

"Sshh, fuck, don't say that!"

_(Here is something everybody knows but him: Mark Zuckerberg is not made to be left alone.)_

 

**january 2022.**

After the honorable discharge of his co-pilot, Mark Zuckerberg is sent back to the Jaeger Academy. The implication is that he will stay there to teach, but since Phantom Culture isn't sent back with him, he doesn't know how he's supposed to do that. He piloted that jaeger for six years -- that's longer than he's ever been anything. He'll wake up in the morning forgetting that he's not circuitry. He'll take a step and forget that Erica isn't there to take the next. Someone will ask Erica a question and she will nod and he will answer, even though there's hundreds of miles of distance between them.

What do you do, after that?

Marilyn goes through applications with him. He fights in the kwoon, and fights, and fights some more. The cadets these days are all younger than he is, and a shameful number of them disarm him in a very short time.

"Let them," Marilyn tells him, doing a good job of schooling her grin, hiding it behind her hand. "We crush their souls pretty regularly, let this be their one claim to fame. You're a veteran, Mark, and you've set the bar very high."

"I don't want to be something they'll brag about at parties over, like, cake and watermelon. I want a co-pilot."

She studies him for a long moment. She tucks her suit jacket over her arm and folds her hands.

"You know who you have to ask," she says.

He does.

 

**february 2022.**

**PHANTOM CULTURE PILOT MARK ZUCKERBERG DISCHARGED FROM PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS**  
PPDC.gov - 21 minutes ago

 

**june 2022.**

White tents cluster together on the baked-bright green of a place called Tecumseh Park. It is summer in Oklahoma, and the children position themselves strategically around the stalls, playing instruments out of their cases and holding out jars that say _college fund :) :)_ A woman stands in the middle of all this, surrounded by patrons and artisans alike. She is small and mousey brown, and when she smiles, it doesn't matter so much that her irises are haloed in blood.

Out of the crowd, a man approaches her.

"Aren't you a jaeger pilot?" he goes, without inflection.

Kneejerk, Erica Albright smiles at him, because it is summer in Oklahoma and it is a beautiful day. The air smells like roasted almonds and a seven-year-old girl in hand-me-down clothes is butchering Hedwig's Theme on a little violin nearby.

"I was, yes," she says, with gentle emphasis on the past tense.

"And it doesn't bother you, how much of the money poured into that project was taken from people like us? What do you think happens to the people who depend on government aid when the government decides it's going to build giant toys instead?" He bares his teeth. His coat is too heavy for the current weather. "People with disabilities, people with special needs, people like us? We become expendable. And I'm telling you, there's a lot more of us than there are civilians in coastal cities. But you've already told us what you think we're worth."

His voice rises.

"If the kaiju want the coast, let them have it!"

And then, from the inside of his coat --

A gun.

Erica sees it level at her, and everything goes hollow and slow.

Someone grabs her arm.

Someone yells.

His eyes bore into hers, triumph and terror weighing together there.

She sees the hammer trip.

She doesn't hear a sound.

 

Two thousand miles away, all the hairs on Mark's arms stand on end all at once, and he half-rises out of his seat.

"Uncle Mark?"

It comes from close by, but it's just syllables, tossed at the side of his head. They make no sense. It's just noise. Everything is noise and grey and, strangely, sunlight.

Mark turns, hands pressing down hard into his stomach, and then he pitches forward.

 

**june 2022, cont.**

When Erica wakes, she finds Eduardo Saverin asleep at her bedside, his head pillowed on his arms on her blanket. She inspects what she can see: the mint green of a privacy curtain, an IV, tape on her wrist. Her toes wriggle when she tells them to. She touches her chest, feeling for the port where they administer the drugs during chemotherapy. Why didn't they hook the IV into that?

She combs her fingers through Eduardo's hair, and he startles awake.

His eyes are a dark swell, wide and frightening and fathomless, and then he focuses on her.

"Hey," he says, offering her a sleepy smile. "Welcome back."

Half of Erica's fondness for this man comes from years of drifting with Mark and watching the relief on his face every time he peeled Mark's helmet off and Mark said, _hey Wardo,_ she knows that, and she doesn't care. She knows what must have happened.

"Did he try to drift with you, that stupid boy?"

There's no other reason he'd be here, if she hadn't ricocheted like a bullet from Mark's mind into his.

Eduardo says, "I volunteered."

"You do that, I've noticed," she says, and combs through his hair again. Mark's in the building. Somewhere. She hasn't drifted with him in months, but the connection's still there, faint and atrophied, like the awareness of a buzzing light at the end of a long corridor. She'll find herself reaching for a drink can that isn't there sometimes -- that's him.

"How far are you going to go to get away from him?"

He's dressed in civilian clothes. He catches her hand, pinning it underneath his cheek as he folds his arms on her bedspread again, nestling in like he's going to go right back to sleep.

"We're never going to be far away from him," he murmurs. "Not really."

"No. I suppose not."

Drift with someone, and you write them in ink into your subconsciousness.

 

**december 2022.**

Mark rages, "That's stupid! They can't just -- after everything you've _done?_ Without you, they wouldn't have had the Winklevosses! Or the Kaurs! Or the Beckets! You're the one that told them to let Chuck Hansen drift with his father to see what happened! You told them that _I_ should pilot a jaeger and I _did,_ I killed kaiju for them for six years and that's because of _you!_ They can't just -- how _dare they!"_

Marilyn smiles sideways at him, soft and sympathetic.

"The Jaeger Program is failing," she says, and there's a funeral in her voice. "And I'm no longer necessary."

 

**august 2023.**

It's the ten-year anniversary of K-Day, and Dustin says, "Hey, man, I've got a new assignment."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," he lifts his shoulders up around his ears, almost apologetically. "I'm shipping out to Hong Kong next week. They want me to code for the Mark III restoration project."

"Oh," says Mark, a sound squeezed out of him around the sudden blooming of dismay that expands painfully underneath his ribs. "Do I know anybody else on that?"

"Stacker Pentecost's name is attached," Dustin confirms. "Christy's working on it, and so's one of her students -- do you remember Mako Mori? The girl from the Tokyo attack?"

 

**january, 2025.**

On the day that Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori float to the surface of the Pacific Ocean and Hercules Hansen announces that they've done it, they've destroyed the breach for good, Mark Zuckerberg is sitting in a glass-walled room in a glass-walled building.

He is almost forty years old. The fog's rolling in over the browned tops of the Junipero Serra hills, brought in from the San Francisco Bay. He can see the haggard ruins of the Stanford bell tower below, the yellow tape marking reconstruction sites. He can't see the Anti-Kaiju Wall from here, can't see Oblivion Bay and the remains of Phantom Culture interred there, but he imagines he can. He swivels his chair around entirely, looking out the window while behind him, everyone stays riveted to Ranger Hansen's delivery.

He thinks, strangely, of the view from Caitlin Lightcap's office that day he was recruited out of PR, watching the Kaurs perform open-heart surgery on another jaeger out on the proving grounds, laid out among the Alaskan summer wildflowers.

They died. The Kaurs, the mother-daughter pair from Fiji, who liked loud music (if not necessarily the _same_ kind of loud music,) and would whistle at the handsome techs they passed in the hallway, although so subtly you could never be sure which one had whistled at you. They died in the coastal waters of Indonesia, sunk and entombed.

_They're in your ears. You hear them go,_ Divya Narendra tells anyone who asks why he left the PPDC. _Cameron and Tyler were in the drift with each other, they didn't need to say a thing, but they yelled each other's names when they died and you don't -- you don't -- you don't forget that._

Almost everyone Mark knows is dead.

Payback, he supposes, for having lost nobody when all of this began.

"Well," he says quietly to himself, and when he looks back, he finds Marilyn watching him.

He smiles instinctively, because Marilyn is and always has been the kind of woman who deserves your best smile, and she frowns back.

She holds out the napkin from her ration tray.

"Your nose is bleeding," she says.

 

 

-  
fin

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I tried to remember the chorus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1468525) by [Liapotter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liapotter/pseuds/Liapotter)




End file.
